Hacking an old 36-78mm Canon lens into a macro lens
Introduction
Hacking an old 36-78mm Canon lens into a macro lens
Recently my old analog EOS 300 camera’s shutter stopped working. I still had a bunch of films I wanted to shoot so I thought I’d buy a couple of these camera’s on Marktplaats. I found that they were really cheap (15-30 euros a piece) and decided to buy 2 of them. All I needed were the camera bodies but one came with a battery grip and the other with a 38-76mm lens. The camera’s are in fine condition, so all is good again, but what should I do with that lens? Since I have 17-85, 28-80, 18-55 and 50mm lenses, this one is rather useless to me. I tried it out but it’s noisy, slow and just sucks. :)
Thankfully you can put such a lens to good use by converting it into a macro lens for close up shots! The lens will be manual focus only, and this hack is sort of reversible. Take a screw driver with a tiny tip and pry it under the sticker that has the canon text on it. It should be pretty easy to take off, but I didn’t manage to keep the sticket in one piece. Next you’ll see 3 screws exposed, unscrew those and put them in a safe place. You can then take out the front lens element, that’s all there is to it. The lens looks pretty horrible afterwards, but hey, it’s the picture that counts!
The depth of field will be pretty shallow, so you will probably have to set the aperture to f22 or so for best results. Don’t forget to put the AF/MF switch to MF as the lens won’t be able to auto-focus anymore. If you half press the shutter release the camera will still bleep when the subject is in focus, that’s very helpful.
Enjoy!
